Hikaru Nakamura shares his thoughts on Candidates, Streaming, and the Future of American Chess (INTERVIEW)

Hikaru Nakamura won the FIDE Grand Prix series of events and therefore qualified for the FIDE Candidates Tournament 2022 which kicks off in less than 10 days in Madrid. Before taking part in the FIDE Grand Prix, Nakamura played no classical OTB games for more than two years and the triumph in the FIDE Grand Prix came out of blue. Even though he is the fourth best-rated player in the US, Hikaru will not be a part of the 2022 US Olympiad Team.

In an exclusive interview for Chess Life, Nakamura explained how he feels to be participating in the Candidates Tournament, how will he perform the stream and live broadcast while playing in the event, and what are his thoughts on the Future of the American Chess.

Herewith we present you Nakamura’s answers on the two most popular topics nowadays – the Candidates and Streaming. The complete interview can be found here.

Let’s begin by talking about your return to the Candidates tournament. What does it mean to you at this point in your career to be a Candidate once more?
First and foremost, it comes as a very pleasant surprise. It was not really an objective of mine when I chose to play in the (2022) FIDE Grand Prix. I was very fortunate to be granted a wild card by the FIDE president, Arkady Dvorkovich. I went into the event wanting to see if I could still cut it against the best players in the world. As most people know, I’ve been streaming a lot over the last couple of years. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I still feel I am quite competitive [with the top players].
I wanted to see how it would go, but there were really no illusions — or delusions, you could say — of qualifying for the Candidates for me. Even after the first event, which I did win, it [qualifying] was not anything that I was thinking about in a serious way. Then in the second event, probably one of the worst possible results [from my perspective] occurred with [GM] Richard Rapport winning, and [GM] Maxime [Vachier-Lagrave] and [GM] Anish [Giri] having fairly… decent results.
Before the third event started, I knew the groups weren’t very favorable with [GM] Levon [Aronian] being in mine. I never really was thinking about [qualifying] until I won this game against Levon in the fourth round of the third FIDE Grand Prix. Prior to that, I knew there were chances. Everyone [was] talking about it when I’m streaming and so forth, but it really wasn’t something that I was thinking about.

Will you be streaming during the Candidates Tournament, or is it just total concentration at that point?
One of the things that [was] really innovative, and it was definitely unique at the time — is that when I’m playing in tournaments, I have teams who come on and cover my games. I don’t actually stream during most of these events. I’ll join for interviews afterwards, or maybe if there’s a rest [day] I’ll do something, but I’m very rarely on the stream itself. Now a lot of other streamers have attempted to copy this.
If you compare that to, I want to say almost any other esport, anything else that’s online, it’s very rare where the main person is not there on the stream itself. It’s something different, and during the Candidates I don’t really intend to be on my stream. I might show up on a rest day where I stream myself, but otherwise I’ll just have my team covering the event, covering my games, and [I will be] joining for interviews here or there.